


not a man of substance

by Anonymous



Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Mentioned Ranboo (Video Blogging RPF), Mentioned TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Toby Smith | Tubbo Needs a Hug, Toby Smith | Tubbo Thinks TommyInnit is Dead, no beta we die like l'manburg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:28:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28771623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Though L’Manburg is quiet, for an hour there is noise travelling through the streets. People congratulate the President on surviving another year like they hadn’t expected him to – he hadn’t either – and give him gifts before walking out of his country without any plans to return, and he smiles at their backs even though they can’t see it, until they’re all gone and he’s left alone once more.-The President of L'Manburg celebrates his birthday.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 33
Collections: Anonymous





	not a man of substance

**Author's Note:**

> okay so right before i fell asleep last night a thought hit me and this is the result
> 
> i hope you enjoy!!!!

L’Manburg, as always, rings silent in the daytime. The sun shines, cold, but giving up the illusion of heat to those who are there to care – though that number isn’t hard to count. The streets are empty, yet full; littered with scraps of the past and colourful confetti that tell a story that nobody wants to listen to, so the streets are empty and full because the people have left so that they can ignore what is still screaming at them, without cleaning it up. Sometimes, when you enter the centre of the country, you can hear the noise of water, artificially placed, lapping over itself. Most of the time, it’s the only sound you can hear, because L’Manburg is quiet and empty and has been for weeks.

It’s on a day such as this – quiet, empty and cold – that the President of the country wakes up and realises, absently, that he is a year older than he was yesterday. He opens his eyes to the faint ache in his body that he’s grown used to, eying the paperwork that he had been working on – obviously, he’d fallen asleep working on the document, and now he’s further behind than he was yesterday – and he sits up, groggy and numb. He reads through the document again to remind himself of what’s going on, reads the date he’d written on the papers while signing it and makes an educated guess, and sighs. It’s a heavy sigh, and if anyone were around to hear it, they would be able to see just how stretched and fractured the President is. Of course, nobody is there to listen or help, so he picks up the pen – still uncapped from last night – and he scribbles mindlessly on a piece of paper on the side until the ink starts flowing again, and he gets back to work.

L’Manburg is quiet, and all that can be heard is the lapping of water in an artificial pool, and the scribbling of a pen as a President handles the load of four people and never complains. For many hours this continues until the sun is nearly at its peak in the sky, and another member of the cabinet walks into the building and searches. He’s checked everywhere else in the country, and he’s checking this place as a last resort, because surely even the most devoted person will take time off on their birthday, right?

But Ranboo finds the President sat, in his office, surrounded by paperwork and physically exhausted, and he almost speaks up – almost calls him out because there’s a difference between prioritising your job and breaking yourself because you’re too scared to ask your co-workers to do their own jobs – but instead he gives him an empty platitude that he knows the President doesn’t really care for, and he asks him to step out of the office for just a minute. Something in Ranboo twists like a knife in the gut when he hears the weak protests, but it only takes a few minutes for the President to break – and isn’t it weird that this happens with everything? – and he takes the President by the hand and leads him into his own country, past the painful silence and the colourful confetti, and ignores the silence behind him which is much louder than anything he’s heard before.

When they wish him a happy birthday, it’s like something flips. The President, so weary and quiet, brightens. He smiles until it reaches his eyes and he straightens until he looks almost like the boy they remember, taking off the suit that’s too large for him and laying it down on a bench somewhere as they take him to enjoy the things they made, and he laughs with them and he seems to have fun with them.

(Of course, they’re forgetting that this is the President who survived weeks as a traitor to a government who hated him and his friends – of course he knows how to fake a placating smile and make people forget he’s lying. They forget that he managed to trick his entire cabinet into believing they had convinced him of their plan, only to turn around and exile his best friend, already dooming him to death. He smiles until they believe it, and he thinks about just how behind he’ll be when he returns to his office and they continue to slack off.)

Though L’Manburg is quiet, for an hour there is noise travelling through the streets. People congratulate the President on surviving another year like they hadn’t expected him to – he hadn’t either – and give him gifts before walking out of his country without any plans to return, and he smiles at their backs even though they can’t see it, until they’re all gone and he’s left alone once more. He walks around the country for a while, searching for his jacket and letting his schooled expression drop. The streets are empty again, littered with the faint whispers of time as he stops, crouches down and picks up a small scrap of blue paper on the ground, staring at it. There’s more like it lining the streets, in shades of pink and green and yellow, and he bites his lip. Adds it to his list: clean the streets and get rid of any sign of the last festival. Then he crumples it in his fist, tosses it back on the ground where he found it and straightens, continuing to search for his jacket.

It’s winter, and the wind is nipping at his arms through his shirt. He wonders if it would be unprofessional to swap the suit out for a jumper, then realises that there’s nobody left to care, and continues looking. Eventually, he finds the blazer, and he puts it back on, taking a moment to button it up. The suit is too large, but he’s grown used to it.

(He’s not really sure who it was for in the first place, but he wonders if it was for Tommy – who’s dead now – because Wilbur had originally called for Tommy to run the country and the suit had been new, hanging crisp somewhere when he’d found it. He dismisses the thought eventually, because Tommy was too tall for this suit, and he is too small for it.)

When he returns to the office, he sits down at the desk, uncaps his pen and continues the reading he was doing, occasionally making the notes he needs to make on the dotted lines that are placed sporadically along each document. The room is quiet, and he finds himself longing for someone to listen to, or something to listen to at least. But there is nothing and nobody there to listen to, so he gets back to his work and ignores the back of his head – thinking only about what word is right to use and not about everything else going wrong. He does this until the silence is manageable, and then until he forgets about it altogether. The next time he looks up, it’s sunset, and the pile has barely dwindled.

He picks up the next one and starts reading, but he stops after a few words. He puts it to one side in a trance-like state, feeling numb while feeling everything at the same time. He doesn’t pick up another one.

(Tommy’s Funeral, it reads.)

The President looks ahead quietly. L’Manburg is quiet, and he is the only thing left of it. The door never opens to let someone into his office, because nobody walks in to talk to him anymore, just like the way nobody returns to his country anymore. The scratching of a pen is all that’s left of him in the same way the lapping of water is all that’s left of L’Manburg – (a crater. They never started over after Wilbur blew the country up, they just turned its scars into decorations and flaunted their trauma in the most conspicuous way possible. Obviously everyone was going to leave in the end) – and when he puts down the pen there is nothing left of either. Even when he stops writing, he keeps it in his hands as if it can keep the country alive through his sheer need to keep it alive.

He stares at the document on the side, and he wishes he had time to mourn.

L’Manburg is a quiet crater still covered in the decorations of his execution, and Tubbo spends his birthday as a President of nothing, having lost everything that made him a person. He'll wake up tomorrow and be a day older, when yesterday he was a year younger, and he'll work again.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!!! :D


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